The manufacture of a button requires the alignment and joining of a front and back portion. Alignment is necessary because the front of the button ordinarily has a design that is intended to be viewed at a particular orientation, and the back of the button has a loop that is to be sewn onto a piece of clothing at a particular orientation. The two pieces must be coordinated if the design on the front is to appear correct to an observer of the clothing. The joining step holds the front to the back, and maintains the two pieces at the desired relative orientation.
At present the button forming operation is carried out manually by an operator using a single press to form buttons one at a time. With one hand, the operator places a back piece into a cradle on the press. A slot in the cradle corresponding to the loop on the back piece orients successive back pieces in a constant position. A front piece is then placed on the back piece, with the design on the front aligned as desired. The operator then activates the press, usually by a foot pedal, to join the pieces together. The completed button is manually removed from the press and the process is repeated.
From the foregoing illustration, numerous shortcomings are apparent in the present mode of button manufacturing. First, the production rate of buttons processed in this fashion is subject to limitations in the operator's faculties, including physical dexterity in handling the button pieces and mental dexterity in aligning them.
Second, and relatedly, the quality control in such a manual process is subject to variations in a given operator's work, and from operator to operator. Thus, high production rates of properly formed buttons having designs consistently oriented within an acceptable margin of error is difficult if not impossible to achieve.
Third, the basic flow of the manual process requires that a button be produced to completion before the manufacture of the next button is begun.
Finally, although many safeguards are present in such press machines, the manual operation of such machines by a careless or inattentive operator can lead to injury.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to improve the production rate of buttons over that of the manual method.
It is another object of the invention to improve the alignment of the button pieces with one another.
It is a further object of the invention to improve the quality control over the button manufacturing process by constraining the range of error which occurs during production.
It is still another object of the invention to provide a streamlined production process in which buttons are simultaneously assembled in a series of steps.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a button forming machine in which operator safety is increased compared to currently utilized devices.